Stranger Things: A Trial-verse Story
A story set in the Trialverse, concerning Shub-Niggurath. Story ' OTTAWA, CANADA' Jacques Beck walked through the street as the day ended. Briefly he glanced at the government building which he was walking to, and there he saw it- the Union Jack, soaring over the Canadian maple banner. The British had been fast to reassert control over as many of their former colonies as they could, and even if Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, the backbone of the new British empire, were supposedly free and autonomous self-governing Dominions in communion with the United Kingdom, it sure didn't feel like it. Not to mention that the British had not given one thought to Quebec. They had forked over Northern Ireland to the Irish to keep them quiet and part of the empire, but Quebec had gotten nothing. Nothing. The Québécois plowed forward, hailing a taxicab. He got in, paid the fare. "To Cumberland," he said, the driver nodding. Jacques looked at the flag hanging from the driver's window. The Union Jack fluttered. Great, yet another Anglo. He fell asleep on the way back. The steady drum of the car's weight lulled him to sleep, and he didn't notice when the driver gently woke him up and dropped him off at a reasonably well-lit newspaper station. Jacques merely grunted and half-stumbled his way home. He opened the doors to his flat, stumbled in, found his bed, and promptly went to sleep again. When he at last regained consciousness, the sun was high, its rays shining bright into his flat. Jacques grunted, rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, stood up, stretched, and walked over to his laptop, which had been lying exactly where he had left it earlier. He turned it on, checked the news. British troops deployed in the Suez' and Sinai Peninsula, rang the American news channels.'' Serbia crushes yet another round of Bosnian partisans'', heralded the BBC. The European Union officially ends reconstruction in Slovenia, shouted the European news agency, Europa. Boring geopolitical bullshit, Jacques surmised. He moved over to Microsoft Word, where his magnum opus lay- well, something that he considered his magnum opus ''anyway. In that document were contained 73,223 words- the result of his research into the supernatural, the organisations behind them, and the causes for the war that had devastated the world. He had the statements of Issei Hyoudou, Rias Gremory, James Bradley, Gaspard Vladi, and many others that had been involved in the Apocalypse. ''Memoirs of a Better Time, he was going to call it, for they really were memoirs of a better time- memoirs of a world that had oft so late found itself existing only in distant memory. The world was really going to shit these days, even if the countries that formed the new world order were rapidly recovering- and in the case of Britain- expanding and empowering. He hit print. And then there was a sharp knock on his door. Jacques Beck froze. It could always just be the slightly pretty neighbor, who he fancied. Alternatively, it could be the IBSPM, the International Bureau of Supernatural Phenomena Management. Yes, the Commonwealth was not part of the IBSPM, for obvious reasons. But the IBSPM was everywhere. They had eyes and ears everywhere. And it was very possible that they wanted to shut him down. Paranoia was very useful in this age, especially if someone was publishing a possibly pro-supernatural work. He opened his closet and fidgeted around in his closet, tightening his hand around the tight familiar grip of metal. A gun. He clicked off the safety and held the gun awkwardly with both hands, as he advanced towards the door. He looked through the door viewer, expecting a crisp, black-suited agent with sunglasses. What he saw was very unexpected.